


always music in the air

by bossymarmalade (maggie)



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon, Surreal, Temporal Displacement, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:39:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/bossymarmalade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the good dale is in the lodge</p>
            </blockquote>





	always music in the air

**Author's Note:**

> standard foreword: if i have written something problematic/oppressive to a marginalized group that you find hurtful, please please please don't think twice about telling me. i will never spew hate at you, will never attack you, and i will always thank you and make the change.

He invents things.

"Diane," he dictates into the featureless, burnt air, "I have discovered the most amazing thing about my new surroundings.  Underneath every level surface lies a thin layer of viscous fluid, which upon careful examination and some rather ill-advised sniffing, I have ascertained to be some sort of apricot jam."

"Gordon," he says into a telephone that looks more like a red phonograph, "although normally your blue rose cases offer mostly fascination and an opportunity for a challenge to me, I will unfortunately be requesting a reassignment from this one, as it appears I have a pressing engagement to play with BOB."

"Harry," he announces to the shadowy figure hanging in the air just out of his line of vision, "I don't think I quite appreciated the simple gift of being able to have a cup of coffee and a jelly doughnut with you, and I hope you know how much I enjoyed it."

He says all of this out loud (he thinks) and there's not any response from anybody here in the Black Lodge (he thinks) and he thinks round and round about how maybe he could have prevented this, he thinks.  Thinking is something he has to struggle to do here; it doesn't slide easily along the patterns of black and white, it doesn't adhere easily to curtains and sheets of red.  It's horrible, because his brain has always been a good and loyal friend to him when even his heart and spirit went truant, and now it's like his brain is in the throes of laying down its arms.

The Little Man From Another Place appears next to him.  The Little Man has a sympathetic look on his face, but expressions like that don't mean much here in the Lodge -- they're just another skin.  "niaga kniht ot woh nrael ot evah uoY," he says, eyebrows raised as the dark pupils of his eyes chase them upward.  "niarb eht no slacimehc evah uoY."  The Little Man taps one finger to his temple, and each rubbery tap is accompanied by a far-off hellish gurgle, tinny and impotent. 

He sits in the chair and watches this performance with a calm face and molten anxiety bubbling up through his body.  For whatever amount of time it is that he's been here (and it feels like he just plunged in, it feels like he's lasted a semester, it feels like he was born here) he's seen many of the inhabitants of the Lodge.  They communicate whenever they want to, and it's surprisingly often.  Some of it is even banal; there was an old lady at one point, with a grandson, who did nothing but sit at an old formica table and look at the wallpaper.  But no matter how often they speak, and even if their messages are not particularly disturbing, he is never ready for them and it feels like they're speaking a language that makes his blood start to ferment.

He invents things because it seems like the thing to do, rather than trying to dwell on the reality of a situation that's taken its leave of reality.  He invents things to try to wake his brain up again.

He invents things because, truth be told, he's scared as hell. 

...

The shadowy figure is holding something.  Small, pinched between its fingers, held up and flitting around the corners of his vision.  Try as he might, he can't get a good look at it.

"The Good Dale," the figure remarked, "should be able to understand."  He will hear the figure say this, and he will feel a moment of sweet, agonizing ecstacy at the sound of his own slippery-forgotten name, and he will feel tears choke him as he forgets it just as quickly.

...

There is a dream, even though he's not sure he ever sleeps in the Lodge.  In the dream he sits in a hotel room, all knotty pine and not unlike the one at the Great Northern, but more run-down and backwoods than that.  There's a clock on the wall and it only has a minute hand, which sweeps lazily around the greater part of its circular route but speeds up with a screech for the two hours before twelve.  He looks at the clock, and he looks at the red bedspread.  He looks at the clock, and he looks at the red bedspread, and there's a boy sitting next to him with dark, neatly-ordered hair and a solemn pale face with mirrorlike eyes.  "I know you," he says to the boy in wonderment.  "I _am_ you," he says in a calm low voice, and now the boy's face is a pasty yellow, lips charcoaled and dark.

He looks at the clock, and the minute hand is stopped at one minute to twelve; he looks back at the boy and the child's mouth is cavernously open, dark lower lip sitting where the chin should have been.  There's no sound, and then there is, and he realizes it's his own hoarse scream.

...

He sat at the formica table and looked at his hands spread out on the pebbled surface and thought about his brain.  And his dream.  And the Little Man From Another Place, who could not always be trusted but did not normally tell things that were false.

"I have chemicals on the brain," he murmured.  "Without chemicals ..."

And there's the Little Man From Another Place (he is the Arm)  
And there's the missing hand from the clock (attached to an arm)  
And there's Mike without chemicals (the one-armed man)  
And his every-trusty brain, having lain down its arms.

Things do not become clear in the Lodge.  But he is resourceful and he can take a hint. 

"I have only one arm here," he says.  He looks down at his hands, and finds only one of them splayed on the formica; the other hangs by his side, numb.  Instead there's a less-shadowy figure standing there, with one of its hands on his shoulder and the other holding a little green ring.

"I am the Arm," Agent Chet Desmond says.  "And I point the way out."

He's not scared anymore.  Things do not become clear in the Lodge, but he doesn't have the time to invent and he has the sudden feeling he doesn't need to now.

Dale Cooper gets up from the table, and he looks where Agent Desmond points. 


End file.
